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Geopolitical shocks compound long-term systemic risks for sovereign issuers

The war in Ukraine has acted to exacerbate or complicate more fundamental and pervasive climate change and energy risks for sovereigns, argues Malika Takhtayeva….

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The war in Ukraine has acted to exacerbate or complicate more fundamental and pervasive climate change and energy risks for sovereigns, argues Malika Takhtayeva.

As we are all well aware, the war is having significant effects on financial and commodity markets – and economies – worldwide.

In a recent blog article, we explored how the crisis is affecting food supplies and how it could impact longer-term food sustainability.

However, as can be seen from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index (see Exhibit 1), rising food prices were already an issue before the conflict.

Recent price shocks sit on top of an inflationary trend that we believe would have persisted over 2022 anyway due to unfavourable climate change-related weather conditions and the increasing cost of fertilisers and energy needed for food production.

These inflationary pressures highlight the need for governments to better respond to physical climate risk and to look to alternative methods of food production.

Recent physical climate hazards have included a major drought in the US wheat-producing state of Kansas and significant water scarcity in the Middle East, Africa, South America and Asia.

Population growth and dependency on imports have left authorities in these regions particularly vulnerable to food insecurity and they are under pressure to act. India, for example, has banned wheat exports after a record-breaking heatwave.

These strains are expected to grow. The UN recently highlighted the extent to which climate change may increase the length, frequency and severity of droughts, with water scarcity expected to affect twice the number of people in 2050 as it does today.

This is not just about crops. In California, where snowpack is significantly smaller this year than normal, water shortages will likely limit hydropower and other power generation capacity. Furthermore, a higher incidence of wildfires has threatened communities and livelihoods and could cause billions of dollars in damage.

Energy crunch

Even before the war in Ukraine, governments faced rising energy prices and a global energy supply crunch as economies bounced back amid a surge in post-lockdown demand.

Demand for energy was met mostly by fossil fuels, leading to steeply higher CO2 emissions. The greater use of coal was the main factor driving up global energy-related emissions by over two billion tonnes in 2021 – the largest ever year-on-year increase in such emissions in absolute terms.

Sanctions on Russia have highlighted the dependence of many EU countries on Russian energy, natural gas in particular. While the EU has agreed on phasing out Russian oil, gas will be harder to replace. In the absence of adequate renewable energy or electrification technologies, energy security concerns are pushing against decarbonisation and net zero goals.

Renewables may be increasing rapidly in the electricity sector, but, as REN21 highlights in its Renewables 2022 Global Status Report, renewables still account for only 12.6% of total final energy consumption (i.e. incorporating transport, heating and cooling), and only 4% in the transport sector, which represents a third of overall energy use.

This has left EU sovereigns looking to hydrocarbon exporters other than Russia; however, some alternative suppliers have questionable human rights records, including many in the Middle East.[1] In fairness, we should note while that physical climate risks are pervasive across the globe, it is also clear that for oil & gas producers these risks are more severe.

While the need for accelerated investment in green infrastructure and renewables as solutions to energy dependency are obvious to us, there is also the reality of governments having to accept trade-offs and compromises to safeguard energy security and diversify supplies away from Russia.

These have included the greater (and longer) use of coal-fired[2] or nuclear power plants, or efforts to get closer to oil-rich countries or gas exporters that are known to have disregarded democratic principles or crushed dissent. For example, the recent rapprochement between the US administration and Saudi Arabia or EU efforts to source liquefied natural gas from Qatar[3].

Arguably, such ‘leniency’ could be seen as undermining governments’ ESG credentials.

Social and political risks

Higher prices for energy and food look set to affect government finances – for example, through a deterioration in the balance of payments.

This saps the ability of governments to deal with macroeconomic challenges and existing fiscal imbalances. It could also lead to social and political upheaval, including possibly violence and rioting reminiscent of the food riots in 2007-08 and 2011-12.

Such events underscore the close relationship between food insecurity and conflict, and have led to growing interest in how food and energy price shocks – as well as competition for natural resources including water – can contribute to political instability and social unrest.

We note that social unrest can have real, adverse effects on the economy. IMF research has found that 18 months after significant unrest, GDP is still around one percentage point lower than it would otherwise have been.

The IMF’s Reported Social Unrest index is now close to its highest level since the start of the pandemic. According to the Global Conflict Tracker, there are 27 conflicts and wars currently taking place in the world.

In summary, we believe issuers of sovereign bonds face large environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks – in particular, countries with high food import costs (see Exhibit 2), weak governance frameworks, and an already negative exposure to social risks.

While the war in Ukraine has resulted in price shocks, more fundamental drivers – including climate change and energy costs – need to be addressed to limit inflation-related risks for sovereigns and, by extension, fixed income investors.

References

[1] The UN tracks progress on human rights including tracking the number of international human rights treaties that countries have ratified; also see – OHCHR Dashboard  

[2] See for example ‘Bitter but necessary’: Germany turns to coal to replace Russian gas | Climate News | Sky News, Germany restarts coal power stations as Johnson rival attacks ‘incoherent’ energy taxes (telegraph.co.uk), Poland, Ukraine increase 2022 coal production to weather cold months | Reuters  

[3] See for example Qatar’s human rights record examined by UN Member States in Universal Periodic Review | MENA Rights Group 

Disclaimer

Please note that articles may contain technical language. For this reason, they may not be suitable for readers without professional investment experience.

Any views expressed here are those of the author as of the date of publication, are based on available information, and are subject to change without notice. Individual portfolio management teams may hold different views and may take different investment decisions for different clients. The views expressed in this podcast do not in any way constitute investment advice.

The value of investments and the income they generate may go down as well as up and it is possible that investors will not recover their initial outlay. Past performance is no guarantee for future returns.

Investing in emerging markets, or specialised or restricted sectors is likely to be subject to a higher-than-average volatility due to a high degree of concentration, greater uncertainty because less information is available, there is less liquidity or due to greater sensitivity to changes in market conditions (social, political and economic conditions). Some emerging markets offer less security than the majority of international developed markets. For this reason, services for portfolio transactions, liquidation and conservation on behalf of funds invested in emerging markets may carry greater risk.

Writen by Malika Takhtayeva. The post Geopolitical shocks compound long-term systemic risks for sovereign issuers appeared first on Investors' Corner - The official blog of BNP Paribas Asset Management, the sustainable investor for a changing world.

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New recipe for efficient, environmentally friendly battery recycling

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries….

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October 17, 2023

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Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries. The method allows recovery of 100 per cent of the aluminium and 98 per cent of the lithium in electric car batteries. At the same time, the loss of valuable raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and manganese is minimised. No expensive or harmful chemicals are required in the process because the researchers use oxalic acid – an organic acid that can be found in the plant kingdom.

Credit: Chalmers University of Technology | Anna-Lena Lundqvist

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries. The method allows recovery of 100 per cent of the aluminium and 98 per cent of the lithium in electric car batteries. At the same time, the loss of valuable raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and manganese is minimised. No expensive or harmful chemicals are required in the process because the researchers use oxalic acid – an organic acid that can be found in the plant kingdom.

“So far, no one has managed to find exactly the right conditions for separating this much lithium using oxalic acid, whilst also removing all the aluminium. Since all batteries contain aluminium, we need to be able to remove it without losing the other metals,” says Léa Rouquette, PhD student at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers. 

In Chalmers’ battery recycling lab, Rouquette and research leader Martina Petranikova show how the new method works. The lab has spent car battery cells and, in the fume cupboard, their pulverised contents. This takes the form of a finely ground black powder dissolved in a transparent liquid – oxalic acid. Rouquette produces both the powder and the liquid in something reminiscent of a kitchen mixer. Although it looks as easy as brewing coffee, the exact procedure is a unique and recently published scientific breakthrough. By fine-tuning temperature, concentration and time, the researchers have come up with a remarkable new recipe for using oxalic acid – an environmentally friendly ingredient that can be found in plants such as rhubarb and spinach.  

“We need alternatives to inorganic chemicals. One of the biggest bottlenecks in today’s processes is removing residual materials like aluminium. This is an innovative method that can offer the recycling industry new alternatives and help solve problems that hinder development,” says Martina Petranikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers.

Reversing order and avoiding the loss

The aqueous-based recycling method is called hydrometallurgy. In traditional hydrometallurgy, all the metals in an EV battery cell are dissolved in an inorganic acid. Then, you remove the “impurities” such as aluminium and copper. Lastly, you can separately recover valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium. Even though the amount of residual aluminium and copper is small, it requires several purification steps and each step in this process can cause lithium loss. With the new method, the researchers reverse the order and recover the lithium and aluminium first. Thus, they can reduce the waste of valuable metals needed to make new batteries. 

The latter part of the process, in which the black mixture is filtered, is also reminiscent of brewing coffee. While aluminium and lithium end up in the liquid, the other metals are left in the “solids”. The next step in the process is to separate aluminium and lithium.

“Since the metals have very different properties, we don’t think it’ll be hard to separate them. Our method is a promising new route for battery recycling – a route that definitely warrants further exploration,” says Rouquette. 
“As the method can be scaled up, we hope it can be used in industry in future years,” says Petranikova.

Petranikova’s research group has spent many years conducting cutting-edge research in the recycling of metals found in lithium-ion batteries. The group is involved in various collaborations with companies to develop electric car battery recycling and is a partner in major research and development projects, such as Volvo Cars’ and Northvolt’s Nybat project. 

Video: Demonstration of the new and efficient method for recycling metals from electric car batteries. Léa Rouquette explains the process in the lab at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

More about the research

The scientific article Complete and selective recovery of lithium from EV lithium-ion batteries: Modeling and optimization using oxalic acid as a leaching agent was published in the journal Separation and Purification Technology. The study was conducted by Léa Rouquette, Martina Petranikova and Nathália Vieceli at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. 
The research was funded by the Swedish Energy Agency (52009-1), BASE Batteries Sweden, Vinnova (2019-00064) and the experiments were conducted with spent electric car batteries from Volvo Cars, processed by Stena Recycling and Akkuser Oy.
 

Journal

Separation and Purification Technology

DOI

10.1016/j.seppur.2023.124143

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Complete and selective recovery of lithium from EV lithium-ion batteries: Modeling and optimization using oxalic acid as a leaching agent

Article Publication Date

1-Sep-2023

COI Statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

Authored by ‘Mr. E’ via bombthrower.com,

Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter!

It should come as no surprise…

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2 hours ago

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October 17, 2023

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The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

Authored by 'Mr. E' via bombthrower.com,

Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter!

It should come as no surprise to anyone following my work when I say that both mainstream and alternative media are, to a very large extent, part of the controlled dialectic put forth by the ruling class. It helps to maintain a division of society, promulgated by useful idiots and true believers of either side’s dogma.

Malcolm X’s famous quote applies:

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

It behooves everyone to have a healthy skepticism of whatever they hear no matter the outlet. But even more concerning to you is when they all begin to push the same narrative. In this report you’re going to see just how much effort some are willing to exert in the maintenance of a popular scapegoat – the Freemasons.

In the days following the breakout of violence in Israel and Gaza Greg Reese, producer of the popular Reese Report, published a video outlining the contents of a letter allegedly written by Freemason Albert Pike on August 15, 1871. The very same letter was reported on in rapid succession by mainstream outlets The Daily Star, Daily Mail, News.com.au, and Express.co.uk in 2016. A South African newspaper also reported on it in 2013.

All these reports make mention that this letter “allegedly” exists, but none went so far as to even attempt to confirm this. They didn’t investigate the sources, and merely uncritically repeated something that appeared too good to be true.

The Devil in the Nineteenth Century

We must go back over 130 years to get to the bottom of this story, and it all begins in France with a man named Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, better known as Léo Taxil. Born in 1854 he was placed in Jesuit seminary school, where he came to be disillusioned with the Catholic faith and religion in general.

Léo Taxil circa 1880, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Eventually becoming a writer, he targeted Christianity with scathing critiques such as The Holy Pornographers: Confession and Confessors and The Pope’s Mistresses. He even ventured into satirical pieces like The Life of Jesus, making a mockery of the immaculate conception, and The Amusing Bible. In 1884 he wrote The Secret Loves of Pope Pius IX, which is exactly what the salacious title suggests and eventually led to accusations of libel.

Also in 1884, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical on Freemasonry where he declared:

The race of man, after its miserable fall from God … separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan … At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardour and assault. At this period, however, the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons. No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God Himself. They are planning the destruction of holy Church publicly and openly, and this with the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom, if it were possible, of the blessings obtained for us through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Perhaps swayed by this polemic, Taxil announced he had converted back to Catholicism in 1885 and set to work on an entirely different literary endeavor with a new target, the Freemasons. Over the next several years he published Les Mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie, a four-volume history of Freemasonry containing curious-but-unsourced accounts of eyewitness’s participation in strange rites. The books were sensational and Taxil even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII himself to congratulate him on all his good works exposing the dastardly plans of the Freemasons.

The best was yet to come, however, when he teamed up with Dr. Karl Hacks to write the two-volume Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, published in 1892 and 1894, telling the insider tale of one Diana Vaughan in the words of Doctor Bataille. The lurid details of her account boggle the mind. She was a member of the Palladium Rite, under the command of Albert Pike, where she was involved in ritual orgies and blood sacrifices. They would summon demons in physical form, and she was even betrothed to one of them.

Chapter 25 of the second volume is entitled “Plan of the Secret Chiefs,” and it purportedly contains the text of a plan written on August 15, 1871, by Albert Pike and the leadership of the Palladium Rite, detailing their plan for the destruction of Roman Catholicism. The description of the final coup-de-grace contains a paragraph that has gone on to be legend:

Therefore, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will become the citadel of papist adonaism, we shall unleash the revolutionary nihilists and atheists, and provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the bloodiest disorder. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization; and the countless disillusioned adonaites, whose deist soul have up until that time remained without a compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing which God is worthy of tribute, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, an event that will arise from a reactionary movement following the destruction of atheism and adonaism, together at the same time vanquished and exterminated.

Catholics fell in love with Taxil’s work, and a Catholic journalist by the name of Abel Clarin de la Rive became friends with Taxil, believing unreservedly in his revelations about the Masonic threat the Church faced. Taxil authorized de la Rive to publish a quote by Albert Pike alleged by Diana Vaughan, Taxil’s whistleblower, in his 1894 book La Femme et l’Enfant Dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle:

That which we must say to the world is that we worship a god, but it is the god that one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: The masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the higher degrees, maintained in the Purity of the Luciferian doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him?

Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also god. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two gods; darkness being necessary for light to serve as its foil as the pedestal is necessary to the statue, and the brake to the locomotive.

Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy, and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.

The assault upon Freemasonry drew intense criticism from their ranks, as well as from other esoteric societies. In 1896 Arthur Edward Waite, a British poet and mystic who wrote extensively on the occult, published Devil Worship in France, a comprehensive refutation of Taxil’s allegations.

By 1897 everyone was becoming impatient with Taxil, whose stories had been growing ever more radical and grotesque. They wanted to meet Diana Vaughan, in person, and Taxil eventually obliged.

The Confession

On the evening of April 19, 1897, Taxil held a press conference at the Hall of the Geographic Society in Paris. Many reporters, Catholic priests, Freemasons, monks, and other illustrious figures from around the world were in attendance. After raffling off a typewriter used by Diana Vaughan (the winner being M. Ali Kental, Editor of Ikdam, at Constantinople), Léo Taxil finally addresses his audience.

He reveals there is no Dr. Karl Hacks, there is no Dr. Bataille, there is no Diana Vaughan, there is no Palladium Rite.

“There wasn’t the least masonic plot in this story,” he says, and denies that his conversion to Catholicism was in earnest – all part of the prank, to win the Church’s trust and approbation. Diana Vaughan was a real person, but she was only his typist and collaborator in this colossal fraud designed to deeply embarrass the Catholic Church and become the crown jewel of his anti-clerical work.

Slandering Freemasons was the best way to establish the foundations of the colossal prank of which I savored all the suave happiness in advance. – Léo Taxil

After explaining in immense detail how everything he published on Freemasonry over the last 12 years was a monumental hoax, Taxil concludes his press conference saying, “You were told that Palladism would be knocked down today, better still, it is annihilated, it is no more,” and that “Palladism is now dead for good. Its father just murdered it.” The audience erupts calumniously, with Catholics hissing and screaming, a priest mounts a chair to try and maintain order, and it becomes obvious why Taxil had the attendees check their walking sticks at the door – some would certainly have beaten him to death on the spot.

They ought to have known better, though, as Taxil’s extensive use of the Baphomet throughout the entirety of his hoax was a dead giveaway that not all was as it seemed. Created several decades prior by another Frenchman, Éliphas Lévi, it was clearly stated in the book in which it first appeared that it was not a representation of a demon or the devil, but something far more complex and esoteric. Ultimately, it was Lévi’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of the extinct Knights Templar, who were massacred by the Catholic Church in the year 1312 after a campaign of blood libel, and false confessions obtained by gruesome tortures. Nevertheless, it found great use being circulated by others like Taxil and de la Rive as a demonic idol.

The shock of Taxil’s confession, the entirety of which was published in Parisian newspaper Le Frondeur on April 25, 1897, rocked the world. The same day Le Père Peinard, a weekly Parisian journal for anarchists, published a detailed recounting of the event.

Here is but a sampling of other stories published about Taxil’s infamous confession:

Taxil further elaborated on the intentions behind his grand hoax in a 1906 interview in Volume XXIV of The National Magazine:

The public made me what I am; the arch-liar of the period, for when I first commenced to write against the Masons my object was amusement pure and simple. The crimes I laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor. But my readers wouldn’t have it so; they accepted my fables as gospel truth, and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced became they that I was a paragon of veracity.

Then it dawned upon me that there was lots of money in being a Munchausen of the right kind, and for twelve years I gave it to them hot and strong, but never too hot. When inditing such slush as the story of the devil snake who wrote prophecies on Diana’s back with the end of his tail, I sometimes said to myself: “Hold on, you are going too far,” but I didn’t. My readers even took kindly to the yarn of the devil who, in order to marry a Mason, transformed himself into a crocodile, and, despite the masquerade, played the piano wonderfully well.

One day when lecturing at Lille, I told my audience that I had just had an apparition of Nautilus, the most daring affront on human credulity I had so far risked. But my hearers never turned a hair. “Hear ye, the doctor has seen Nautulius,” they said with admiring glances. Of course no one had a clear idea of who Nautilus was, I didn’t myself, but they assumed that he was a devil.

Ah, the jolly evenings I spent with my fellow authors hatching out new plots, new, unheard of perversions of truth and logic, each trying to outdo the other in organized mystification. I thought I would kill myself laughing at some of the things proposed, but everything went; there is no limit to human stupidity.

Taxil would die ten months later in March 1907. In November of the same year the Sydney-based Catholic Press published an anonymous letter eulogizing Taxil as “The World’s Worst Liar,” and that he had “died despised by those who had known him and by the great world he had cheated,” while calling him a “horrible buffoon,” whose “thrilling fairy tale under the guise of fact took the Catholic world by storm.” More accurately, however, they also called his hoax “the most successful fraud of the nineteenth century,” something Taxil certainly would have taken as a compliment.

It was Taxil’s intent to exploit people’s tendency towards confirmation bias in his hoax, which had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. However, what he didn’t foresee was that the egos of his victims were so big that they would carry on pushing his fabrications as if nothing had happened. Confession or not, it had to be true.

The World in Chaos

With World War I kicking off in 1914, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, people were scrambling for a coherent explanation of why so much chaos was being sown around the world. In 1920 a book called The Cause of World Unrest emerged attempting to explain it all. It was an anonymous compilation of essays originally published in the London Morning Post in July of the same year.

In one of the essays we find Taxil’s magisterial hoax cited as truth, describing the chapter already mentioned above from Le Diable au XIXe Siècle about the written plan drawn up on August 15, 1871 by the fictitious Palladian Rite for global destruction. A familiar paragraph from the so-called plan is reproduced in The Cause:

That is why, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will have become the citadel of Papal Christianity (adonaisme papiste), we shall unchain the revolutionary Nihilists and Atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the most bloody disorder. Then, everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned of Christianity, whose deist soul will up to that moment be without compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing where to bestow their worship, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, a manifestation which will arise from the general movement of reaction following the destruction of Atheism and Christianity, both at the same time vanquished and exterminated.

There is no mention of Taxil’s sensational confession in the pages preceding or following the reproduction of this part of the hoax. It does say in The Cause that this quote and the document it allegedly comes from could be a hoax, but that it nevertheless is quite prophetic.

But was it really? The rising tide of revolutionary socialism in the late 19th century was surely no stranger to Taxil. Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto had been in circulation for decades prior to Taxil creating the hoax, and bloody revolution was already being openly discussed. It was only a matter of where it would first emerge, and popular locations for that had already been determined to be Russia or Germany.

The Cause would go on to be used in the 1925 book called The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled, published by Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Chile. In it, the Cardinal uncritically repeats what he found in The Cause, reproducing verbatim the same paragraph from Taxil’s hoax. How a Catholic Cardinal would not know this was a fabrication is surprising seeing that he would have been nearly thirty years old at the time of Taxil’s confession and by then already an ordained priest.

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Tyler Durden Mon, 10/16/2023 - 23:55

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China’s “National Team” Is Quiet After August ETF Buying Spree

China’s "National Team" Is Quiet After August ETF Buying Spree

By Ye Xie and Amy Li, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategists

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3 hours ago

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October 16, 2023

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China's "National Team" Is Quiet After August ETF Buying Spree

By Ye Xie and Amy Li, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategists

On Oct. 16, 2007, the Shanghai Composite Index hit a record high of 6,092. Exactly 16 years later, the benchmark closed 50% below that record. On Chinese social media, ridiculing the poor stock-market performance has become a national pastime.

Even the recent arrival of the National Team – state-backed entities such as a sovereign wealth fund and pension funds — did little to shore up sentiment. To be fair, though, their support has been half-hearted, at best.

Despite data showing the economy is stabilizing, the stock market has continued to trade poorly. The announcement that a sovereign wealth fund was buying bank stocks and reports that Beijing is considering a gigantic stabilization fund barely made any difference.

One headwind has been the relentless selling by foreign investors. They are on track to pull out from the northbound stock connect for a third consecutive month, which would mark the longest outflows since the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock connection debuted in 2016. In August, a record 90 billion yuan ($12 billion) of funds flew out the door.

Coincidentally, August also saw a record inflow of 143 billion yuan into Chinese equity ETFs trading on the mainland. That was quite an unusual splurge, almost double the previous record.

According to Goldman Sachs, the National Team — which collectively owns about 3.5% of the market value of local stocks — was largely behind the ETF purchases. The net inflows to the National Team’s top-five “favorite” ETFs surged by more than 90 billion yuan that month.

If that was the case, they have since become dormant. Investors added 23 billion yuan to ETFs in September, before withdrawing 6.5 billion yuan this month. If sustained, October would be only the second time on record when both ETFs and northbound connect registered net outflows.

It seems to suggest that support from the National Team was rather opportunistic and lukewarm. It steps in only when foreign outflows become sizable.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/16/2023 - 22:55

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